The central topic of this article is “femme invisibility” when researching queer women’s lives in archival material. The difficulty in identifying and researching historic persons who “read straight” due to conforming to gender expectations is paralleled by the author’s experiences as a femme (i.e., straight-passing) queer woman who repeatedly found herself calculating the risks of coming out to archival personnel who could potentially gate-keep access to material based on attitudes toward the type of research being done.
Irene Leache & Anna Wood
